Sunday Coffee: Thoughts on influence and social media scalability

Due to my exams, I was not able to complete any interviews yet, but we’ll have more in the coming weeks from founders of great startups to businesses who are doing extremely well in groupon or group buys. As for today, I plan to sit back, relax, and enjoy my cup of coffee alone in my boxers (You don’t want to imagine how I look).

However, this week’s Sunday Coffee would still include case studies which we all could learn from. I spent the entire day reading blog posts and watching some videos from various blogs. Two of those videos that got me thinking today were from Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) and Tom Webster (@webby2001).

Social media is not scalable – Use other people’s content

Social media is not scalable, Jeremiah says in his video. When you reply to complaints from angry customers, you are actually teaching them or encouraging them to yell at their friends whenever they have a problem. I agree with this statement, as it was something that I talked about, because people will always have problems, and one sure way to solve it is to look at the main problem. If your company has problems with late product deliveries, solve it.  However, that doesn’t mean that companies should not respond to complaints on social media. It is the opposite, and companies should do their best when responding to customers. The main point here is that companies cannot solve problems ONLY through social media. It is not scalable. Your customer service team cannot reply to hundreds of thousands of complaints and questions from your customers, therefore it is not scalable and is not achieving maximum effectiveness.

How should companies deal with this problem?  What happens if you have inquiries from people who aren’t sure which product is suitable for them? Jeremiah recommended that companies should use OPC. OPC stands for “other people’s content”, where companies could reward customers who help other customers. Using OPC means companies are encouraging experienced customers to chip in and provide contents that would help other customers. This would help the problem of scalability and help your company in dealing with customers. An example would be what Dell is currently doing in their dell support forum. The top users in the forum aren’t working for Dell, however they spend nearly 8 hours a week in the forum helping others. Dell interviewed them and asked them why did they do so, and their response was because they love hearing others say “thank you”.

Do watch the video, it is 45 minutes long and it’s worth every minute.

Building Your Social Strategy: Prioritizing the Coming Year from Bazaarvoice on Vimeo.

Social media influence – Measuring Klout score is not enough

Measuring Klout score, clicks, retweets, and reach is not enough – says Tom Webster at Brand Savant. Although Klout scores do give a rough idea and its accuracy is getting better, it is still far from perfect.

Klout scores do measure influence, but it still fail to cover other metrics. Influence is broad. We need to know the variables before and the variables after. Tom went on to give an example of his 11 year old WaterField laptop bag. The measurements would be to ask about how many people watching the video knows or have heard of WaterField bags, and if they have heard of it, what are their negative or positive opinions about the bag.

After talking about the WaterField bag and showing visuals about the bag, Tom then asks again how many have heard of WaterField bags and the answer would be the amount of people watching the video. Furthermore, after hearing him talk about the bag, how many people have changed their opinion from negative to positive, or vice versa, and how many will seek further information about WaterField after he had told them. The question would be did he manage to compel a change in your state of mind about his laptop bag, and therefore it’s important to know the variables before and after, rather than just influence numbers. It’s about what you do with the measurements and how you make it work for you.

The video is about 30 minutes long and there are more information inside. You will get a clearer views on influence after you’ve watched it. Link in below.

How To Think About Online Influence from Tom Webster on Vimeo.

Certainly two great videos that I recommend all of you to watch. Both are packed with a huge amount of information. Do take out a piece of paper and a pen. You’ll be needing it.

Your thoughts?

(for some reason I can’t embedded the video from vimeo)

by Mike_fleming